The joys of monopolies, I guess. I think that the only solution is to break them, and that goes through regulations.

Competitors have the option of not selling to big tech (and not taking money from VCs who will then pressure you to sell to big tech).

I thought so too, but they suck as well. It's really strange.

I wonder if we can re-design the www stack. Keep what is working, discard the rest, but design it correctly up-front, so that e. g. Google or others can not ruin it anymore. The 1990s were better in this regard IMO.

The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire).

In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park.

A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329

> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228

(Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”)

One of the only actual levers in society is interest rates and let me tell you, the current state does not favor those who just want to have a sustainable business.

This is the most amazing presentation I've ever seen in my life.

I hadn't seen that. Just a hunch, but it's probably a red flag when someone starts comparing themselves to non-existent mythical beings.

Unfortunately, today's MBAs can barely see beyond the current quarter. Everything is a P&L to them, everything is a cell in a spreadsheet. This MBA culture is slowly strangling American companies and squeezing the life out of them.

What a fever dream of a presentation, but I bet it was effective.

That’s so hilarious and sad at the same time.

I’ve put together many investor presentations throughout my time and seeing the stuff that SoftBank gets away with is honestly insane. My bonus would’ve been at jeopardy if I would’ve presented slides like that to my senior bankers.

The tipping point from steady improvement to steady enshittification is just post the 2008 recession. As soon as the financial incentives were put in for growth (2009+) the trend shifted hard to value extraction from a captive audience.

Eh. I understand the vibe, but so many millions of things have gotten so, so much better in my lifetime.

We could spend all day trying to list them, if we tried.

how old are you? smartphones are strictly better than no smartphones or no mobile phones. internet is better than no internet. etc.

I’ve never heard someone claim windows peaked at 8, at least 7.

Peak was Windows 2000 Professional.

Windows 8 was never peak. It was the one that introduced the tablet view that nobody wanted.

It's weirdly kinda true...at least in games, my kids and I noticed that there were a bonkers number of great games in 2016 in particular, but also kind of around that period (2018 had some greats as well). Sure, there are some standouts in recent years here and there, but it seems like the overall trend is downward.

Was kind of excited to see Crate Entertainment release a new DLC for Grim Dawn this past week, given that's a game from 2016. Love the approach of adding more content to something known to be good.